A new era for the McGill Journal of Global Health with Leslie Brown
Leslie Brown, U3 Physiology and Health Geography Student
This year, I have the opportunity to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Journal of Global Health, in what is a defining time to be part of the publication: coinciding the Journal’s tenth anniversary with the largest global health crisis in our lifetimes thus far, the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps this will be the first time the Journal is popular not just for its excellent research, but for its mainstream relevance.
I originally joined the Journal’s editorial board in 2019, armed with only vague notions of global health and a half-completed minor in Health Geography to fuel my interest. Since then, my understanding and outlook on global health has changed dramatically, only to be accelerated by the pandemic: the fundamental ideas of how privilege and social contexts determine health, and the underpinnings of colonialism, white saviorship, and systemic inequities that permeate the whole field, which the Journal is implicated in as well. In a field that struggles to shed outdated principles, I wanted to be involved in pushing at least a small element of it forward myself.
As an editorial board, the goal of the McGill Journal of Global Health is to solicit, select, and showcase the research being done in global health and related interdisciplinary fields at McGill University. We’ve had the honor to publish case studies and research articles ranging from exploring the first dengue vaccine (Spring 2017), to investigating the repercussions of Trump’s global gag rule (Spring 2018), or the systemic racism within American maternal healthcare in the most recent edition (Spring 2020), among innumerable highlights. This piece, a discussion of Inuit birthing practices and policies that appeared in the 2013 edition of the Journal, was in fact the first to pique my interest in even joining the publication.
In all the previous years, we operated on a publishing cycle that would publish one volume at the end of each academic year. However, in a global moment of transition, the Journal has also had to evolve. Even the Journal’s name has come-of-age, when an effort in 2019 spearheaded the end of ‘The Prognosis’ and the birth of ‘The McGill Journal of Global Health.’ The name change was a reflection of the evolving nature of this field and how we perceive global health; rarely now within just the context of biology or biomedical science, but as a consequence of the interplay between policy, society, geography and more, which inevitably shape the health of individuals and populations. Similar to the biomedicalization of aging, addressing physical expressions of illness is to ignore the symptoms of a greater problem in how we approach health as a whole.
Like many initiatives, the Journal is pursuing new and more virtual avenues this year. We have transitioned to an online, rolling submissions process; and we are now concentrating our efforts onengaging with our audiences in an online world. In the ten years since our Journal’s conception, the global health landscape has become hardly recognizable, and now especially has become a crucial time for self-reflection on how we disseminate global health information. I hope that this year we can continue to uphold the Journal’s mandate, to provide a platform for student global health research, while continuing to challenge and educate students on the complicity that social, environmental, and political determinants have had in forging today’s health inequities, reminding us that there is a long road to dismantling these forces.
About the Author
Leslie Brown is a U3 student pursuing a degree in Physiology with a minor in Health Geography. She is interested in global health, social determinants of health, and preventive medicine. Outside of academics, she is highly involved in student journalism, and has recently had the opportunity to combine these two interests as editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Global Health.